In a previous post, we argued that affordable housing should be a critical issue for whoever is appointed to fill the vacant seat on the Northbrook Village Board. Our current plan is not working — and has not worked for more than twenty years. Worse, it may also be impairing other important Village priorities, including downtown revitalization.
After hearing from readers, it became clear that affordable housing is both controversial and poorly understood across the Village. It is easy to discuss in broad moral terms and much harder to confront honestly in practical ones. The roots of our current predicament go back a hundred years and run deep. There are no easy answers. That should push all of us to spend more time listening and learning, and less time prescribing and judging.
What follows is my attempt to do that. I have spent a fair amount of time digging into the history, the law, the local record, and the broader debate, and this series is my effort to distill that research into something more manageable. I would genuinely welcome hearing from those who know this issue better than I do — both on what I may be missing and on what they think Northbrook should do differently.
The arithmetic, however, is a good place to start.
According to Northbrook’s 2025 Affordable Housing Plan, the Village has 674 affordable housing units out of 13,395 total housing units, or five percent. Under Illinois law, municipalities with less than ten percent affordable housing stock are subject to the state’s affordable housing planning requirements. Northbrook sits well below that threshold.
To put that gap in perspective, the fastest way to reach it would be for each of the next roughly 740 units built in Northbrook to be fully affordable. Northbrook would need to more than double its current affordable housing stock without adding a single market-rate unit. If that does not already sound implausible, consider that the Village’s net increase in affordable units since the law was enacted has been just 30 units — and that Northbrook has actually seen a net decline in affordable units since 2018.
Northbrook’s actual affordable housing plan submitted to the state is more forgiving. It requires qualifying developments to include 15 percent affordable housing. At that rate, producing the affordable units needed to close the gap to ten percent would require roughly 13,300 new housing units — about double Northbrook’s current housing stock. At the pace of development Northbrook has experienced over the last twenty-five years, roughly 80 units per year, it would take an eye-popping 166 years to reach the state’s ten percent threshold. And that assumes the Village even has room for that level of expansion.
Illinois as a whole is struggling with housing supply. Basic logic suggests that building more affordable housing starts with building more housing, period. Yet the most prominent parcels for expansion in Northbrook have sat idle for years. Our most notable recent gains in affordable housing have depended on free or below-market land, while still moving the needle only modestly. The plan taxes the very entities we are relying on to improve the situation. And the model we hold up as the gold standard is not producing results.
I reject the notion that Northbrook should not care about housing affordability. We should. But caring starts with an honest framing of the issue, clear eyes about the constraints, and genuine openness to the possibility that our current plan is not the answer.
Rather than force everything into one long post, I am breaking this into four parts.
Part I: How We Got Here We begin by tracing the path that led to Northbrook’s current framework: the broader housing context, the logic behind Illinois’ affordable housing law, Northbrook’s earlier plans, and the 2020 ordinance that was supposed to mark a more serious effort.
Part II: How the 2020 Framework Actually Works From there, we look more closely at the mechanics of the 2020 ordinance and why they matter. That includes the affordability tiers, the difference between rental and ownership math, and the scale of the revenue gap developers are effectively being asked to absorb.
Part III: What the Record Shows Only then do we move from design to results. We look at what Northbrook’s policy has actually produced since 2020, what happened in the 2025 re-submission process, and how Northbrook compares with nearby communities like Glenview and Deerfield. We also examine the still-unfinished 1825 Shermer process as a case study in how housing can move slowly and awkwardly here even on sites that seem like logical redevelopment candidates.
Part IV: Stepping Back — and What It Means for Northbrook Finally, we widen the lens. Northbrook’s experience sits inside a much larger debate in Illinois over stronger enforcement, looser regulation, and state preemption of local zoning. That broader context helps clarify the issue here at home: there is no serious path to Northbrook’s housing goals without more building, and there is no serious path to more building without developers. Yet our posture often suggests distrust of the very people we need, while expecting them to carry most of the burden of solving the problem.
This is not a series about abandoning affordable housing as a goal. It is about asking whether the framework we have chosen is equal to the task, whether we are naming reality, and whether Northbrook is serious about producing results rather than just signaling concern.
Stay tuned for Part I tomorrow.